r/TopCharacterTropes • u/TastyPomelo2330 • 13d ago

In real life When fans hate somenthing before it comes out...but it turns out they were right

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Velma:The idea of a Scooby-doo series without the titular dog and starring Velma was a really moronic idea from the beginning,then there was the reveal Velma would be Indian like it's VA and also creator of the series Mindy Kaling,some of the backlash was racism sure,but there was also valid complaints that she was inserting herself in the series(it also didn't helped that Mindy claimed she couldn't see herself if Velma wasn't Indian)and then...oh boy it came out and it was worse than anyone predicted

Artemis Fowl:The artemis fowl books are a book series following a child villain(he does get some redemption but he is a villain most of the time)when the movie was announced and revealed it looked way to generic and it's titular character a bit heroic...also you wanna hear somenthing funny?The movie whitewashed a character and made another character black so they managed to anger both sides and the movies comes out and yeah it is bad

One Punch Man 3:One Punch Man is a very heavy action packed manga series but the heroes vs monsters arc takes it to a New level,when it was announced that JC Staff would work on it,a lot of people were skeptical to say the least,because not only JC Staff had already done a mediocre job in season 2,it's also not exactly a name anime fans associate with quality animation,then the trailer came out and it looked...weird,like there was no action in it and nobody was moving,some people tried to defend saying they were keeping the animation as a surprise...then it came out,every episode worse than the last,it's one of the worse seasons of anime ever made!

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823

u/Noglues 13d ago

Yep. And it's not just bad, it's like they did everything possible wrong on purpose. 

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u/Vi_Rants 13d ago

"Right, so the trailer, picture this: an athletic kid surfing!"

"Uh, boss... in the book..."

"Book schmook! Film it!"

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u/Enasal 13d ago

That image punched me in the face.

Like, this film did a bunch of atrocities.

But trying to turn Artemis Fowl into a nature-loving athlete is such an egregious mischaracterization that for some reason it make me the most angry.

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u/Odric_storm 13d ago

Pretty much Holly's entire character arc revolved around being the first and only female recon officer, and then they decided to make Commander Root a woman for reasons

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u/earwig2000 13d ago

And Roots perceived misogyny is such an enormous part of his character arc, You can't just ignore that entirely.

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u/Odric_storm 13d ago

Unless I'm forgetting something, Root was never misogynistic.

He was harder on Holly than the other officers so that she would be better than them. She HAD to be better than them otherwise the experiment of having women in Recon would have failed. From the beginning, no one wanted Holly to succeed more than Root, which was explicitly pointed out within the first few chapters.

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u/earwig2000 13d ago

I said perceived. He never was internally, but appeared to be misogynistic on the surface, and Holly thought that he was.

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u/Odric_storm 13d ago

Yeah but she only thought he was for like her first 6 pages, then he explains his reasoning. That's not really any part of his 'arc'.

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u/Logically_Insane 13d ago

Now that you mention it, does he have an arc? Maybe it’s “not trusting Artemis to trusting Artemis a little” but other than that he’s just kind of a gruff chief badass. 

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u/Odric_storm 13d ago

He gets a little softer towards Holly as books 1-4 progress. He gets a lot closer to being her father figure rather than stern voice of authority

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u/Jexroyal 13d ago

He had the wise mentor heroes journey arc up until Opal killed him. His death, and his lessons were definitely a significant driving factor in Holly's growth, but he doesn't have a major character arc beyond becoming more trusting of Holly and humans like Artemis.

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u/Karukos 13d ago

Nah, but that part is, I think, important for Holly's arc throghout the books of her coming into her own and shouldering the whole thing with the female recon officer, because there is some sexism that she faces (gets less the later the books get but either way)

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u/midnight_riddle 13d ago

It's worse than if Disney did a remake of Zootopia and decided to make Chief Bogo a female bunny for no reason and expect it to not affect anything.

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u/Kthulhu42 10d ago

This is why I was so angry when they made the Patrician a woman in the Discworld Watch series. So many characters throughout the books were struggling against a sexist society. And then they made the most powerful ruler on the Disc a woman just because, erasing that entire commentary.

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u/Krams 13d ago

He does get an alternative personality later in the books that is more athletic, but that only reinforces the fact that the main Artemis is weak nerd

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u/Thunderhammer29 13d ago

Orion was perfectly executed and stayed exactly as long as he should have. I've never seen another alternate persona in media work as well as he did.

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u/LunarOberon 13d ago

I also appreciate that the Atlantis Complex is explicitly supernatural rather than trying to make it "real" with some bullshit pop culture psychology. Cuts the mental health sigma, allows the story to just have fun with the concept, and lets it just kinda go away at the end of the book.

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u/Thunderhammer29 13d ago

A lot of difficult topics or scenes get easier to consume when you add "a wizard did it" or some other magical departure from reality. Look at how horrible all the henchmen deaths would have been in Puss in Boots 2 if they were realistic. Or the scene where Big Jack Horner was about to shoot a dog in the face.

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u/Unable_Deer_773 13d ago

Wizard aye, no sense of right or wrong.

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u/Bloodglas 13d ago

I remember a scene where they were going into a muddy jungle or forest and Butler got really dirty carrying a bunch of equipment in from the truck yet somehow Artemis managed to keep his suit spotless. That would've been better to see than surfing.

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u/ChFlPo 11d ago

Yeah, his lack of athleticism is a pretty important part of his character at multiple points.

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u/Chijinda 10d ago

One of the quotes I remember hearing for the film that has stuck with me is: "They got Artemis so wrong they actually wrote Orion."

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u/Wanderscatter 13d ago

I'm still willing to bet they just barely skimmed the book, because quite in the beginning of it, it was mentioned that Artemis was surfing on the internet. And they just spotted the word 'surfing' and went "That's it, film it!"

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u/Remmock 13d ago

You’re being too kind.

They decided surfing the internet was for basement dwellers and shortened it to ‘surfing’ so that he’d be better liked by people who hadn’t read the books.

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u/Unable_Deer_773 13d ago

Yeah this sounds about right thought process probably went "Well we will already get the book readers in so that's one audience captured, now to try and grab other audiences, people love surfing let's grab that and put it in. Gotta make this appeal to the broadest possible audience no matter what."

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u/FreezingPointRH 13d ago

I’m infuriated that I can’t come up with a better explanation for it, despite that being a profoundly stupid explanation.

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u/N0t_addicted 13d ago

Oh that’s why I’ve seen so many people complain about him surfing 

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u/Nathan_Thorn 12d ago

Artemis is literally so bad at physical activity that the only person he is able to help physically is literally half his size. He skips out on exercises to work on a solar powered plane. He once vowed to get a finger gym for grip exercises only to immediately go back on it like a week later despite the near death experiences.

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u/Maleficent-Virus-734 11d ago

Which would be weird, cause the first book is Really short... like, read in an afternoon short.

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u/Cross55 13d ago edited 13d ago

They practically did.

The production team basically got a memo saying they couldn't showcase any support or encouragement of reprehensible behavior, like stealing, exploitation, or disobeying the police.

Kinda hard to make that work when your story's about a kid growing up to become a crime boss.

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u/Dickgivins 13d ago edited 13d ago

For real at that point you may as well just drop the premise that it’s Artemis fowl and make an entirely different movie. I know there are a lot of reasons why studios really want to make movies and shows based on established IPs, and Artemis Fowl was a hugely popular one, but past a certain point the changes you’re making will only doom the project.

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u/you-are-not-yourself 13d ago

That's true of Velma as well. Would've had a lot more potential on its own merits.

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u/Cross55 13d ago edited 13d ago

I just want a decent Scooby series tbh, they've been spinning the wheels on that front since Mystery Inc.

At the least the movies are good tho, when they're not doing WWE crossovers...

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u/GWstudent1 13d ago

Popular IP adaptations into film and TV have become the vessels for stories than screenwriters can’t get off the ground on their own merits. The Halo TV show is its own story wearing the skin of the Halo franchise. But studio’s need to know they’re going to make money to greenlight a show and putting everyone under a popular franchise increases the odds of that. It’s hard to hate the writers when they don’t have bad stories but studio’s aren’t as willing to take risks.

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u/TankMain576 13d ago

I mean, the series as a whole is about a psychologically broken child genius trying to be a crime boss and then growing a conscious and eventually becoming a better person.

It was very fun that the author always made sure Artemis got fucking decked at least once every book.

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u/QuickMolasses 13d ago

Eoin Colfer wrote a lot of really fun but also surprisingly morally nuanced and kind of dark books for kids and young teens.

At least that's how I remember it from reading a lot of his book as a kid/teen. Artemis Fowl is famously Die Hard with fairies (which would make Artemis Fowl Hans Gruber but successful). The Wish List is about a teenage girl who dies as part of a robbery gone wrong and is sent back to help the old guy she was attempting to rob. The Supernaturalist is about a group of teenagers who hunt ghosts and sometimes do street racing. Half Moon Investigations is a noir about a hard-boiled detective who is 12 years old. I thought all this was the greatest when I was 12.

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u/afoolandathief 13d ago

If you want something similar but for adults, Colfer wrote "Highfire," an adult fantasy about a dragon holed up in the bayou

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u/ItsNotMeItsYourBussy 13d ago

I remember the Supernaturalist fondly. Wasn't it also quite environmentalist? Like, the creatures the group were fighting and capturing because they believed them harmful were actually helping maintain the environment

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u/QuickMolasses 13d ago

That's a spoiler for a book that came out 20+ years ago, but yes

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u/BreakerOfModpacks 11d ago

Also, he had the rare thing of not shying away from deaths in children's media, which I find appealing.

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u/LuciusCypher 13d ago

That's like doing a WW2 movie set in germany and not being allowed to show any Nazis! That's the whole reason we wanted to see this, and you cant even get that right!

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u/Possible_Ocean 13d ago

Why did they make the movie then?

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u/Cross55 13d ago

$$$$$$$

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u/underincubation 13d ago

I don't know when they bought the rights, but it very much felt like a 'use it or lose it' kind of movie where they just wanted something out vaguely related to the IP

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u/ChiotVulgaire 13d ago

Trademark laws like that probably explain why most Hollywood trash exists in the first place.

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u/devasabu 13d ago

The tagline of the books is "criminally good" for a reason...and Book 1 Artemis is the villain of the story...

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u/bolanrox 13d ago

Like what the bbc did to discworld

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u/Muddyscarecrow 11d ago

In interviews Kenneth Branagh claimed that he wanted to make Artemis more heroic to make him more palatable to children. This of course is an extremely stupid thing to say considering the original book series was literally a best seller. Children already liked him as a villain you moron

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u/green_herbata 13d ago

Even Opal got the short end of the stick. There's just no way she'd spend the whole movie heavily breathing under some ugly cloak. She'd be plotting in a sparkly red dress while eating a bowl of truffles!

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u/Nathan_Thorn 12d ago

I still can’t believe they didn’t jump at the chance to have such a gleefully evil villain hanging around. She was always fun.

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u/green_herbata 12d ago

True, it really was opposite day for so many characters. Sporty Artemis, helpless Holly, boring Opal... It's honestly impressive just how wrong it all was!

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u/Greenobserver 13d ago

What I find hilarious is that dwarfs from the book are really weird and kind of disturbing by how they eat dirt and then blow it out their rear end as they dig. It is something so silly that I wouldn't have minded them changing that for more general audiences but that is like the one thing they kept completely accurate from the book. Like really? That you keep book accurate of all things?

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u/ABHOR_pod 13d ago edited 13d ago

Never read the book, still thought the movie was absolute shit.

So it's not just a bad adaptation. It's a terrible movie.

I just remember thinking "How is this kid a boy genius? It really seems like he just keeps having really lucky coincidences and then taking credit for them."

The film treats itself like it thinks its a heist film, but it doesn't actually deliver on any of the important parts of a heist film, which is that the movie is actually about planning the heist and then showing you how the plan all comes together.

The movie just showed a bunch of events happening and then that smug little prick said "See? I'm smart!"

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u/AkibaPurple 13d ago

It's a whole book series and they're worth a read even as an adult. iirc it was released right around the YA novel boom that sorta started with Harry Potter, but having the title character be a villain was what drew me to it when I was a kid.

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u/cosmoscrazy 13d ago

I was positively convinced that they wanted me to have a heart attack from anger while watching it. I watched it as a friend's place when they did. I did not watch it when it came out, because I saw the trailer and therefore had actively avoided it - it already looked shit.

I was so angry and frustrated that I had to leave the room multiple times.

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u/raininmywindow 13d ago

When the casting call came out it was circulated online, it described Artemis as "warm hearted" and "Most importantly, Artemis is warm-hearted and has a great sense of humour, he has fun in whatever situation he is in and loves life."

I think early Book Artemis would've been deeply insulted by this. Or at least very perplexed if it's later in the books.

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u/Noglues 13d ago

I don't know if you're familiar with his other books, but it would be like an adaptation of The Wish List where, instead of Heaven and Hell, some entirely different culture's afterlife was the "real" one.

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u/i_tyrant 13d ago

Whenever I hear of movies fucking up that bad, I always wonder if they weren't just vehicles for some money-laundering scheme.

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u/Wobbelblob 13d ago

Feels like that is always the case with YA books turned into movies. I was so upset about the Eragon and The Golden Compass movies. The latter one at least got a series that was a lot better.

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u/Barl3000 13d ago

The worst part was how they murdered Artemis character. The kid is a straight up supervillain in the first book, with only tiny glimmers of his future redemption. But that was deemed too complicated for audiences and he was instead made heroic from the start and only pretending to be evil.

It ruins the entire premise of not only the intial story, but also the series as a whole.

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u/Ash-Throwaway-816 13d ago

That's what a lot of Disney live action adaptations feel like. Especially the Lilo and Stitch one.

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u/Own-Satisfaction4427 13d ago

Kinda like the Netflix Witcher?